Investigations & syntheses
Long-form, documented and sourced articles connecting discoveries and telling the great transformations of humankind.
Ten thousand years ago, in the Fertile Crescent, groups of hunter-gatherers began cultivating wheat, raising sheep, and building permanent villages. This 'Neolithic Revolution' was to transform humanity from top to bottom — for better and for worse. Full dossier: origins, inventions, key sites and latest discoveries.
Read more →Ten thousand years ago, in the Fertile Crescent, groups of hunter-gatherers began cultivating wheat, raising sheep, and building permanent villages. This 'Neolithic Revolution' was to transform humanity from top to bottom — for better and for worse. Full dossier: origins, inventions, key sites and latest discoveries.
Read more →In 1895, in the Dordogne, a decorated cave proved that prehistoric people had painted and engraved underground. La Mouthe ended years of scepticism and opened the era of cave art.
Read more →Emerging from an Alpine glacier in 1991, the Similaun man is the oldest and most thoroughly studied natural mummy on Earth. His skin, tools, last meal and the arrowhead lodged in his back tell of a Copper Age murder.
Read more →45,000 years ago, the first Homo sapiens in Europe carve the lion-man, cut bone flutes and invent figurative art. The great symbolic explosion.
Read more →Farming reaches Europe via the Danube and the Mediterranean, then raises dolmens and alignments, from Carnac to Stonehenge. Five millennia that remade the continent.
Read more →A circle of [[megalithe|megaliths]] raised nearly 5,000 years ago on Salisbury Plain, Stonehenge keeps surprising us: in 2024 its Altar Stone was traced to Scotland, over 700 kilometres away.
Read more →From Hallstatt to La Tène, Iron Age Europe built towns, struck coins and shaped a unique art, before Greco-Roman texts brought it into history.
Read more →Far from the textbook brute: tools, art, burials, and 1 to 2% of their genome still in us. An inquiry into a humanity that vanished, yet lives on.
Read more →Farming, herding, villages: in the Fertile Crescent, around 10,000 BC, everything changes. The greatest fork in our history, up to Anatolia's first towns.
Read more →36,000 years of images in the dark of caves. How these masterpieces upended our view of the first modern Europeans.
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